Google has always held a strong reputation among tech enthusiasts and the geek  community for some time now. Part of the reason being it’s high standard of morality and buisness ethics when it comes to promoting it’s own products.

In fact, Google has always pledged to compete with all buisnesses in a fair manner. Its easy for a company holding the majority share of all online search to self-promote products of it’s own interest, but google has strieved to play it fair. Google fans often to refer to this type of buisness practice as being the “Anti-Evil” Policy.

However, some recent actions by Google point to a violation of their self-claimed “Anti-Evil” policy.

A few months ago, Google displayed small notes called Google Tips on top of organic search results, which promoted their own products like Blogger, Picasa, Google Calender, and several others. That decision produced an outrage in the tech world resulting in Google actually putting an end to Google Tips. 

Google is currently displaying Google Checkout icons next to their own products which is simply a tactic to promote their own software. In addition to icons/logos, Google is also adding other graphical components such as wide badges and text descriptions to ads displayed on Google Search results pages to “help shoppers identify Google Checkout merchants” more easily.

An icon, which can be classified as an image next to the given advertisement would naturally result in better exposure and a much higher rate of click through. This action can certainly be seen as a unfair method of self-promotion and has the potential to gain a large press coverage in the coming days as this topic gains heat.

[via:Digital Inspiration]